![]() Police seizures of massive luxury yachts in European ports have become the most visible symbol of the West’s effort to crack down on Putin and his inner circle in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.īut they are also particularly visible evidence of the Russian ruling class’ corruption. And for another, American officials say her true owner, through a haze of intermediaries, is likely to be Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the Italian police’s decision to seize Scheherezade on Friday in Marina de Carrara was different.įor one thing, Scheherezade is not a person, but a 459-foot luxury superyacht. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.A single arrest in a Tuscan port is rarely international news. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. (SOUNDBITE OF RADIOHEAD SONG, "PARANOID ANDROID")Ĭopyright © 2022 NPR. ![]() and its allies can keep the pressure on the economy, sanctions on individuals could be a powerful tool as long as they're directed at those oligarchs with a triple threat - money to lose, power to wield and access to Putin's ear. They need to provide silovarchs with real incentives to either turn on their boss or convince him to back down. MA: To really be effective, these sanctions have to be a lot more targeted and a lot more specific than this wide net that the U.S. It's layered in different off-shores, and that will require much more investigative work. HIRSCH: But Markus says identifying and targeting these men is not easy. We could even see internal attempts at a coup. So we could see from this - you know, specifically from the group of silovarchs, we could see pressure. MARKUS: If Putin loses coercion, you know, he loses power. And assuming the war in Ukraine grinds on and sanctions continue to pummel the Russian economy, Markus says these silovarchs should be a priority target. MA: These are the men Putin will increasingly rely on in the coming weeks to keep the Russian people in line. You combine these two words, you get silovarchs. So we call them siloviki, then oligarchs. MARKUS: Siloviki is the reference to the Russian military and quasi-military elites. MA: The military elites, which include the most recent generation of oligarchs, the so-called silovarchs. MARKUS: He is, however, incentivized to listen to the military elites. Markus says that probably won't achieve a whole lot. But because they've been so rich for so long, many of these two categories of oligarchs are highly visible, and so they're the ones that have been sanctioned. And so most of them aren't in Putin's inner circle. MA: Part of the deal with Putin is that they can get as rich as they want, but they've got to stay out of politics. And they grew ultra-wealthy in exchange for kickbacks. MARKUS: He basically gave super-lucrative state contracts to his buddies, so to say. MA: After coming to power in 2000, Vladimir Putin set about creating a new generation of oligarchs, some of whom were pretty close friends of his from St. But they bought them very cheap, and they became super-rich. HIRSCH: They didn't quite give them these assets. And then after the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia tried to build a market economy, they had to privatize all those state assets. STANISLAV MARKUS: The Soviet Union was, of course, a state-dominated, planned economy. They became wealthy when the Soviet Union fell apart in the 1990s. First, there are the original, the OG oligarchs. Stanislav Markus is an associate professor of international business at the University of South Carolina and a specialist on Russian oligarchs.ĪDRIAN MA, BYLINE: Markus says these oligarchs fall into three loose categories. Some of them live large, right? They travel widely, and they're often seen in the media. PADDY HIRSCH, BYLINE: It's hard to say how many oligarchs there are in Russia. Paddy Hirsch and Adrian Ma from NPR's daily economics podcast The Indicator explain who these people are and what that means for the effectiveness of sanctions. The sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine have targeted its economy and its oligarchs, extremely wealthy individuals with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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